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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23165863">like real people do</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegone/pseuds/renegone'>renegone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood &amp; Manga</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emperor Ling Yao, F/M, Infidelity, Mild Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Xing, emphasis on mild!, this is mostly feelings and bittersweetness told from lan fan's perspective</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:54:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,473</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23165863</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegone/pseuds/renegone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>and yet—Ling, the man who had once been the vessel to the deadly sin of greed, had always been willing to give himself to her. </p><p>all she had to do was accept. </p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lan Fan/Ling Yao</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>like real people do</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You’re tired,” she tells him. A hearty laugh thunders out from Ling’s throat, followed by the eager removal of his robe and the unceremonious way he gathers the silken thing in his hands, only to throw it on the floor. </p><p>“Never of you,” he insists. The young emperor laughs again when Lan Fan makes a point to undress in a more deliberately time consuming manner, peeling off layer by layer and neatly draping each article over the arm of the chair at his writing desk. </p><p>What follows is a blur of searching hands and skin pressed on equally urgent, burning skin. There are two too many hands trailing up and down her torso and far too little clothes on her body. But there’s something about the way that Ling is holding her, close enough for her to feel his heartbeat and the sweat slick on his skin, that excuses just about every blasphemous thing they are doing.</p><p>A stray, skittering voice tickles the inside of Lan Fan’s skull and tells her: <em> this is wrong. </em>Ling quiets it with a caress on her cheek, his palm warm and open like the rest of him, as though he’d heard it too and wanted to drive it away. He succeeds, of course. In a silent show of gratitude, Lan Fan tugs his hair out of its ceremonial knot, pleased with the way Ling’s face softens in relaxation as soon as his hair pulls free. She puts his crown on the bedside table, beside the incense burner that fills the emperor's chambers with heady, floral smoke. </p><p>She remembers the days when just the thought of being tangled in Ling’s embrace made her skin crawl. Not out of disgust, but in paralyzing fear; she had vehemently clung onto the notion that they would never be together in such a way. How naive she’d been, suppressing her own wants, turning him away even when he so desperately, freely gave.</p><p>Lan Fan bent to him in every other respect, but not in the realm of affection. </p><p>And yet—Ling, the man who had once been the vessel to the deadly sin of greed, had always been willing to give himself to her.</p><p>All she had to do was accept. </p><p>The first time he’d kissed her, Lan Fan tore herself away from him as though she had been slapped. She let her guard down for the smallest of seconds, judgement clouded by the tenderness in the way he had asked, having let herself be selfish for once in her life. Lan Fan couldn’t bring herself to savour it for too long, however. She knew what it implied and sought to nip it in the bud. How frightened she had been of treason, of tarnishing his name and perhaps even jeopardizing his rule. The litany of people still vying for the throne spent their miserable days waiting to prove that Ling was too young, too reckless, too inept for his role as a young emperor. A scandal involving his bodyguard, the least noble and desirable of all the women he kept in his company, could very well have been a point of contention for his enemies to prey upon. </p><p>It resulted in Lan Fan reverting back to how she conducted herself around him when the homunculus had taken control, willing for their affections to be extinguished by the distance and duty she put between them. Except that it proved to be much more difficult to freeze him out as an adult than it had been as a snarling, raging, fighting girl—especially after all they have said and done and survived. There was no more entity to despise, no malignant homunculus that had crawled into Ling’s skin and refused to give him back, no object to frame her hate around except for her own self. </p><p>At the end of the day, there was only her and Ling: her liege, her oldest friend, a star-crossed love, and the entirety of his sorry, giving heart—pliant and giving only for her. </p><p>Time had the final say. The ice around them slowly came to a thaw: it was a lonely world, with the court and its teeth biting down on Ling’s throat and the ever-present threat of him being usurped or assassinated. They needed each other, in the plainest of terms. They needed to be close, to fall back into the same like-minded step they had been in their youth, to be attuned to one another down to the beat of the other’s heart and its thrum in the dragon’s pulse. </p><p>Needs soon became wants, and wants, in turn, became addressed. Damn the court, damn the dumbfounded twist in her gut every time she watched him get married, damn it all. Ever dutiful Lan Fan, rebellious at last, albeit still in the shadows where she has always been. </p><p>“You’re beautiful,” Ling says as he pulls away from where he’d been pressing his lips to the delicate spot at her jugular, a lazy smile melted into his features, before they resume their ardent pace. It’s disarming how he looks so pleased with himself and Lan Fan thinks about how he’s her emperor, who is married, and how she’s supposed to push off from him like the sensible person she is; but they aren’t virtuous like that. If they had been, these trysts would have never begun in the first place and Lan Fan would have dutifully, resolutely kept her distance. </p><p>Evidently, this is not the case, with her in his lap and his hands in her hair, while the rest of the palace had already long gone to sleep—including the most recent imperial wife in the bed chambers down the hall.</p><p>Ling’s wives are political fodder, all five of them so far delicate, porcelain-skinned and well-spoken women, worlds away from the roughened edges and low birth that Lan Fan hailed from. She doesn’t hate or envy any of them: there was no point in comparing jade to iron, after all. They were all smart and certainly enamoured with the emperor, but what they truly yearned for was leverage and status that came with becoming an imperial wife, doing it all for the glory of their respective clans. They wore cunning and intelligence alongside their ornate dresses and red painted lips, diplomacy as their weapon of choice. If anything, Lan Fan respected them—she could never imagine being in their place, wed and celebrated for a definite stretch of time before they faded into the background, clamouring for relevance.  </p><p>A sixth wife is likely to be added soon, some time in the beginning of the spring season when the weather and scenery would be far more fitting for an imperial wedding. Lan Fan knows she’ll have to attend the ceremony from the shadows once again, well-versed in the art of stifling the sound of a breaking heart beneath armour and a mask. She has never once pledged her protection to any of the wives, as they each came to the imperial capital with their own guard; Ling never asked her to, either. He often tells her that he has asked too much of her already, the conversation always boiling down to the stump of her arm, its phantom pains, and the metal one that took its place: a lived nightmare strung together by sacrifice and regret. </p><p>Long before he ascended to the throne, Ling had always been averse to the idea of having fifty wives like his wretched father before him. But traditions do not crumble overnight, over the course of years or even a lifetime. It was his duty, a necessity to keep the clans in his favour: a sacrifice drenched in regrets yet again. </p><p>Lan Fan remembers King Bradley, wrath personified, telling her about his own wife in the final moments of his life. How confused she’d been, a sixteen year old bodyguard with a blade for a wrist, being told of the First Lady of Amestris. Lan Fan taunted the dying monster for being so inhuman, and he’d told her with utmost certainty the words that still haunt her: <em>My wife understands. She is the woman that I chose to live by my side. There are no more words that need to pass between us. </em>Even Wrath was afforded a choice in the matter of love, having found himself a woman that loved him in spite of all he has done and allowed him to live a full life. </p><p>How laughable that Bradley rots in hell now, and she is damning herself too.</p><p>Ling drags her back down to earth by pressing a kiss to her shoulder blade, at the apex where metal meets scarred flesh. He murmurs something that makes her eyes roll, more out of amusement than anything else, and at once, her worries dissolve. Neither tragedy nor age could shake him and his humours: he was still the same hilarious and charming Ling that snuck his way into her heart and made a home for himself there all those years ago. </p><p>He breathes sweet nothings into the expanse of her skin for the most part, but some nights Ling lets slip something too specific, too loving, too sincere. They were dangerous, wistful proclamations at best, but sometimes he says his words with enough conviction to frighten her to the core. In those moments when Ling lets his heart speak before his head, it’s Lan Fan who was to anchor them and remind him of their places in this life. When he tells her that he loves her with reckless abandon, it becomes all too tempting to simply accept his words and return them, damning the empire and the wives and all his advisors in an admission of three words. </p><p>But they aren’t afforded that luxury, because he is the emperor and she is his sworn servant: forever beneath him like the earth is to the heavens. Lan Fan tells herself time and again that she is entirely content with her reality, so long as she can ensure that he remains living and prosperous and close to her in this lifetime: she'll want for nothing else. </p><p>Besides, she would never let Ling ruin himself in that way. </p><p>So they settled for this: a labyrinthine little thing that bordered on romance, the muse of poems and plays that milked tragic love stories for all their worth. He’ll find her in a secret passage in the royal gardens and hold her in broad daylight, their figures obscured by the towering statues and sloping tree branches. Then, she’ll sigh against his shoulder when he has her pinned to the wall in the armoury, the swords and knives she’d been sharpening long forgotten. They are always careful not to leave marks on the other, careful not to tug too hard or muss too much so that they can easily return to their pristine states soon after. </p><p>For all their scheming, the majority of the courtiers are none the wiser. Still, some have tried to separate them, with talks of allowing Lan Fan to take charge of a regiment in the army and climb the ranks there, an opportunity for her to be eclipsed by another at the emperor’s side. But Ling would be sooner caught dead than have her replaced, and Lan Fan cared not for war or glory. What they needed was each other, in this confounding, never-ending game of survival, in every which way they could manage.</p><p>In the present, they share almost ten seconds’ worth of silence when they pull away from each other again, all flushed faces and heaving chests. On the eighth second (because of course, Lan Fan had been keeping count), she finds that her mind still draws blank when thinking of a response to his words of <em> You’re beautiful</em>. She had never been the best at words and especially found herself disarmed by compliments, so she decides to respond by craning her head down and planting a kiss underneath the slope of his jaw, her favourite line and angle. Ling smells good and clean and almost reverent; an unholy part of her wants to bottle up his scent and tap it onto the thin skin above her wrists and on her neck like perfume so that it’ll waft about her for hours on end.</p><p>Ling, responsive as always to her touch and affection, continues to lavish her with zeal. He is always gentle with her until she asks more of him, giving and giving and giving without reservation. He takes such unabashed pride knowing that Lan Fan is only ever like this with him, her affections and touches reserved for him only. </p><p>When they finish, Lan Fan stays in the bed and his embrace only until Ling’s eyelids start to flutter. She rises, limbs loose and head syrupy, regretfully untangling herself from him. </p><p>“Stay,” Ling says from where he is laying amid a sea of silks, no trace of a lopsided grin or a playful tone just yet. He truly wants her to stay, as he does every night she spends with him—but they both know that it is impossible. He already knows her answer and never wants to hear it, so he smiles through the disappointment instead. Lan Fan mirrors his smile, and Ling's own grows to rival the sun in brightness. She thinks her heart might crack open and fall to the floor at her feet. </p><p>“I’ll be next door,” she tells him. It is the simple truth: being the emperor’s bodyguard meant that her room is adjoined to his, eternally prepared and available at a moment's notice. Lan Fan slept closer to Ling than any of his wives, and there’s a quiet smugness that burrowed itself into her heart the first time that Ling had pointed it out to her. She knows him: each and every ridge, valley, scar, curve, thought, desire, flaw, and failing. Likewise, he knows her just as well. </p><p>Lan Fan busies herself with redressing, ensuring that all her knives were still in the right sheaths and holsters in order to ignore the heavy press in her chest that flared up every time she had to leave. When she turns to bid him goodnight, Ling surprises her by rising from his comfortable position on the bed with an outstretched arm: he's never been one to let her go without putting up some kind of a fight, no matter how futile it proved to be. She secures the last of her ties before taking his hand, which pulls her close against him. Ling kisses her, fervent despite his exhaustion, and she leans into it with the same ardor. </p><p>The empire sleeps, yet Lan Fan is wide awake in the arms of her emperor, who gives and gives and gives—to her, and her only. </p><p>Sacrifice is but a small price to pay. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>this is the first time i've written anything lingfan (!!!) so i'm still trying to get the hang of their voices, especially lan fan's which i found a bit tricky. i love them so much, they're some of my most favourite characters in the series. and they just so happen to be right up my alley in terms of dynamic and pining. </p><p>thanks for reading!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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